A psychometric comparison of anxiety-relevant attention measures

Background and Objectives: Preferential attention to threat, emotional response inhibition, and attentional control each purportedly play a key role in anxiety disorders. Divergent psychometric properties among attention measures may produce differential detection of anxiety-related associations and treatment-related changes. However, no studies have directly compared the psychometric properties of these attention measures in the same sample.

Design: Eighty-five young adults (M?=?19.41 years, SD?=?1.47, 48 Females) completed a cognitive task battery and a subset of 60 participants (M?=?19.42 years, SD?=?1.48, 33 Females) completed the task battery again approximately two weeks later.

Method: To assess preferential attention to threat, emotional response inhibition, and attentional control, the cognitive task battery included a dot-probe task, emotion and gender Stroop tasks, and a flanker task. Tasks varied in how attention was directed and if emotional stimuli were included. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were compared across measures.

Results: Within the same sample, internal consistency and reliability differed across attention measures. Explicit attention measures (emotional Stroop and flanker) exhibited stronger internal consistency and greater test-retest reliability compared to implicit measures (dot-probe and gender Stroop).

Conclusions: These results inform clinical research using attention measures to assess anxiety-related differences and treatment response.     

Increasing the salience of fluency cues does not reduce the recognition memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease!

In Alzheimer's disease (AD), it is now well established that recollection is impaired from the beginning of the disease, whereas findings are less clear concerning familiarity. One of the most important mechanisms underlying familiarity is the sense of familiarity driven by processing fluency. In this study, we attempted to attenuate recognition memory deficits in AD by maximizing the salience of fluency cues in two conditions of a recognition memory task. In one condition, targets and foils have been created from the same pool of letters (Overlap condition). In a second condition, targets and foils have been derived from two separate pools of letters (No‐Overlap condition), promoting the use of letter‐driven visual and phonetic fluency. Targets and foils were low‐frequency words. The memory tasks were performed by 15 patients with AD and 16 healthy controls. Both groups improved their memory performance in the No‐Overlap condition compared to the Overlap condition. Patients with AD were able to use fluency cues during recognition memory as older adults did, but this did not allow to compensate for dysfunction of recognition memory processes.     

Autonomic and subjective responsivity to emotional images in people with dissociative seizures

People with dissociative seizures (DS) report a range of difficulties in emotional functioning and exhibit altered responding to emotional facial expressions in experimental tasks. We extended this research by investigating subjective and autonomic reactivity (ratings of emotional valence, arousal and skin conductance responses [SCRs]) to general emotional images in 39 people with DS relative to 42 healthy control participants, whilst controlling for anxiety, depression, cognitive functioning and, where relevant, medication use. It was predicted that greater subjective negativity and arousal and increased SCRs in response to the affective pictures would be observed in the DS group. The DS group as a whole did not differ from controls in their subjective responses of valence and arousal. However, SCR amplitudes were greater in ‘autonomic responders’ with DS relative to ‘autonomic responders’ in the control group. A positive correlation was also observed between SCRs for highly arousing negative pictures and self‐reported ictal autonomic arousal, in DS ‘autonomic responders’. In the DS subgroup of autonomic ‘non‐responders’, differences in subjective responses were observed for some conditions, compared to control ‘non‐responders’. The findings indicate unaffected subjective responses to emotional images in people with DS overall. However, within the group of people with DS, there may be subgroups characterized by differences in emotional responding. One subgroup (i.e., ‘autonomic responders’) exhibit heightened autonomic responses but intact subjective emotional experience, whilst another subgroup (i.e., ‘autonomic non‐responders’) seem to experience greater subjective negativity and arousal for some emotional stimuli, despite less frequent autonomic reactions. The current results suggest that therapeutic interventions targeting awareness and regulation of physiological arousal and subjective emotional experience could be of value in some people with this disorder.     

The perception of (naked only) bodies and faceless heads relies on holistic processing: Evidence from the inversion effect

Faces and bodies are more difficult to perceive when presented inverted than when presented upright (i.e., stimulus inversion effect), an effect that has been attributed to the disruption of holistic processing. The features that can trigger holistic processing in faces and bodies, however, still remain elusive. In this study, using a sequential matching task, we tested whether stimulus inversion affects various categories of visual stimuli: faces, faceless heads, faceless heads in body context, headless bodies naked, whole bodies naked, headless bodies clothed, and whole bodies clothed. Both accuracy and inversion efficiency score results show inversion effects for all categories but for clothed bodies (with and without heads). In addition, the magnitude of the inversion effect for face, naked body, and faceless heads was similar. Our findings demonstrate that the perception of faces, faceless heads, and naked bodies relies on holistic processing. Clothed bodies (with and without heads), on the other side, may trigger clothes-sensitive rather than body-sensitive perceptual mechanisms.     

Auditory driving and affective influences

Past research has shown that variations in musical tempo influence the perceived rate of visual motion. The goal here was to investigate whether this effect is influenced by audiovisual affect. Participants were presented with montages (slideshows) of positive or negative scenes accompanied by positive or negative music whose rate was either the same as, or 15% faster or slower than that of the montage. The results of a subsequent recognition task showed a higher false alarm rate to faster and slower visual scenes in the presence of accelerated and decelerated soundtracks, respectively. Moreover, the magnitude of these effects significantly increased when music–montage pairs displayed a positive and negative affect, respectively. In contrast, variations in visual rate exerted no influence on auditory rate recognition. These findings have implications for audiovisual art forms as well as theories of cross‐modal perception.     

Associative false consumer memory: effects of need for cognition and encoding task

Two experiments investigated the effects of product–attribute associations on false consumer memory. In both experiments, subjects were presented with sets of related product attributes under incidental encoding conditions. Later, recognition memory was tested with studied attributes, non-studied but associated attributes (critical lures) and non-studied unrelated attributes. In Experiment 1, the effect of Need for Cognition (NFC) was assessed. It was found that individuals high in NFC recognised more presented attributes and falsely recognised more associative critical lures. The increase in both true and associative false memory was accompanied by a greater number of responses that index the retrieval of detailed episodic-like information. Experiment 2, replicated the main findings through an experimental manipulation of the encoding task that required subjects to consider purchase likelihood. Explanations for these findings are considered from the perspective of activation processes and knowledge structures in the form of gist-based representations.     

Attention network test: Assessment of cognitive function in chronic fatigue syndrome

Information processing difficulties are common in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). It has been shown that the time it takes to process a complex cognitive task, rather than error rate, may be the critical variable underlying CFS patients' cognitive complaints. The Attention Network Task (ANT) developed by Fan and colleagues may be of clinical utility to assess cognitive function in CFS, because it allows for simultaneous assessment of mental response speed, also called information processing speed, and error rate under three conditions challenging the attention system. Comparison of data from two groups of CFS patients (those with and without comorbid major depressive disorder; n = 19 and 22, respectively) to controls (n = 29) consistently showed that error rates did not differ among groups across conditions, but speed of information processing did. Processing time was prolonged in both CFS groups and most significantly affected in response to the most complex task conditions. For simpler tasks, processing time was only prolonged in CFS participants with depression. The data suggest that the ANT may be a task that could be used clinically to assess information processing deficits in individuals with CFS.     

Semantic classification of pictures and words

We provide new behavioural norms for semantic classification of pictures and words. The picture stimuli are 288 black and white line drawings from the International Picture Naming Project ([Székely, A., Jacobsen, T., D'Amico, S., Devescovi, A., Andonova, E., Herron, D., et al. (2004). A new on-line resource for psycholinguistic studies. Journal of Memory & Language, 51, 247–250]). We presented these pictures for classification in a living/nonliving decision, and in a separate version of the task presented the corresponding word labels for classification. We analyzed behavioural responses to a subset of the stimuli in order to explore questions about semantic processing. We found multiple semantic richness effects for both picture and word classification. Further, while lexical-level factors were related to semantic classification of words, they were not related to semantic classification of pictures. We argue that these results are consistent with privileged semantic access for pictures, and point to ways in which these data could be used to address other questions about picture processing and semantic memory.     

Are Automatic Conceptual Cores the Gold Standard of Semantic Processing? The Context‐Dependence of Spatial Meaning in Grounded Congruency Effects

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory‐motor features activate sensory‐motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects (e.g., processing the spatial feature of up for sky should be faster for up vs. down responses). Growing evidence shows these congruency effects do not always occur, suggesting instead that the grounded features in a word's meaning do not become active automatically across contexts. Researchers sometimes use this as evidence that concepts are not grounded, further concluding that grounded information is peripheral to the amodal cores of concepts. We first review broad evidence that words do not have conceptual cores, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically. Then, in three experiments, we provide further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context, with the central grounded features in a concept becoming active only when the current context makes them salient. Even when grounded features are central to a word's meaning, their activation depends on task conditions.